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Glenburn, Maine Company Attempts to Trademark "Electoral College"

Just yesterday a t-shirt company we make designs for, Skreened, received a threatening letter from ECSA, Inc. Glenburn Maine, founded and apparently still owned by John N. Diamond and Marcia Diamond. You can read the text of the letter here. In it, ECSA uses lawyer Anthony D. Pellegrini of the firm Rudman & Winchell to threaten to drag the nice people at Skreened to court unless the following shirt was removed from sale:

Oh, dear, I can’t show you that shirt image any more, can I? No, because I can’t afford to hire a lawyer to fight ECSA’s lawyer off. That’s how power works in this country.

Now why did ECSA declare that I must remove a t-shirt from sale, a t-shirt that (you’ll have to take my word for it) bore the phrase “Electoral Community College?” Because in 2006, ECSA decided to try and trademark the phrase “Electoral College”:

In fact, in communicating with CafePress, it was agreed that several “stores” would not be disabled, as the merchandise being offered through them was deemed overtly political.

How much more “overtly political” can you get than a t-shirt placed in a shop that calls itself “progressive”, with the t-shirt explicitly tagged “political” and with a subtitle to the shirt: “political humor t-shirt”?

But hey, never mind that. Just hire a lawyer, and you can make all that rationality and political freedom go away. Poof!

About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.